Dr. Sven Schmitz joined the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Penn State University in 2010. He received a diploma degree in Aerospace Engineering from RWTH Aachen (Germany) in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from the University of California Davis in 2006. Sven spent four years as a post-doctoral researcher and project scientist at Davis before coming to Penn State. He is an expert in rotary wing aerodynamics with an emphasis on vortical flows. His growing research program embraces the areas of wind turbine aerodynamics and rotorcraft aeromechanics. Current activities include wind farm wake modeling, icing on wind turbines, rotor hub flows, and rotor active control.
Areas of Interest :
- Rotary Wing Aerodynamics, Wind Turbine Wake Modeling, Rotorcraft Aeromechanics
Check out our videos :
- Dr. Schmitz speaking about wake modeling and turbine-turbine interactions at the U. of Wyoming in October 2013:
- The fluid dynamics video considers an array of two NREL 5-MW turbines separated by seven rotor diameters in a neutral atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). The neutral atmospheric boundary-layer flow data were obtained from a precursor ABL simulation using a Large- Eddy Simulation (LES) framework within OpenFOAM:
"On Turbine-Turbine Interactions Subject to Atmospheric Boundary-Layer Inflow"
Teaching :
- AERSP 311 (Aerodynamics I)
- AERSP 423 (Intro to Numerical Methods in Fluid Dynamics)
- AERSP 497C (Wind Energy Engineering and Projects)
- AERSP 583 (Wind Turbine Aerodynamics)
- AERSP 597# (Engineering of Wind Power Plants)